Paper refuses to cover rodeo with restrictions

My definition of "sport" outlaws anything you can do somewhat decently while drunk. I.E. golf, bowling and racing are not sports. Rodeo might be hard drunk, but you could do it if you tried hard enough.

 

Some people have problems with gymnastics, figure skating, diving and other judge scored events, but they still call those activities sports.

 

Drunk auto racing would be great!

 

And that designation is always a matter of dispute.

 

I'm O.K. with gymnastics as a sport and I haven't seen either figure skating or diving live so I can't say one way or another.

 

By this criterion, baseball was not a sport to Mickey Mantle.

 

I'll take rodeo over golf, though I'd take pooh-sticks over goddamned fucking golf.

 

Guess I should chime in here since I might be the only person on this site who has worked both sides of this issue. For a long time I was a small-town newspaper sports reporter. Six months after taking the job as sports editor in Stephenville, Texas, I moved to Colorado Springs to work for the Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association, where I helped run the media room at the National Finals Rodeo. I later worked for the National High School Rodeo Association, where I was a one-man media department. And now I'm with a western magazine where I cover rodeos ranging from amateur to high school to college and professional. So I know a few things about the way folks on both sides of this issue think.

Every rodeo in the country that has a media person will have specific areas where reporters can and can't be during the rodeo. It's a safety issue. The average reporter covering his first or second rodeo doesn't always realize that the alleyway he's standing in is the out gate for the bulls. He also might not realize that he needs to be at one end of the arena to catch timed-event guys and at another end to get the rough-stock cowboys. He might not realize that most barrel racers need a few minutes to get their horse cooled down and calm before they can do an interview. He might not realize that standing on the back of the bucking chutes is the most dangerous place for a person to be (often more dangerous than being in the arena itself). Etc.

That being said, I've seen a lot of rodeos go out of their way to make things difficult for the media. Many don't have a media room, take hours to produce official results and offer no help in catching cowboys after their events. For those of you who might have to cover a rodeo in the future, sometimes the best thing you can do is forget the media person and head straight to the rodeo secretary's office. She'll have a daysheet (list of that day's competitors), be able to point you in the right direction on possible stories, help you find cowboys and in many cases have results available long before the media folks. The secretaries travel from rodeo to rodeo and know the cowboys as well as anyone. The media person for the rodeo often only deals with rodeo full-time for one week out of the year.

I've never covered the rodeo in question, so I can't speak to their policies. But I agree with the folks who said the paper might want to see what's going on before bailing on the event completely. Sometimes these policies are put in place by boards of directors who have no experience in media issues. Such policies are then in many cases simply ignored by the folks charged with carrying them out. The media wranglers might not be all that bad to work with, but there's no telling until you get there.

I will point out that the bigger the rodeo, the more red-tape (same as any sport). Smaller rodeos tend to let reporters do whatever they want and are thankful for the time.

 

Thanks for the report partain, that was informative to me.
Thanks.

 

Good stuff, partain

 

Yeah, but they gored the Celtics the other day.

 

But it took more than 8 seconds...